Busy. That's the word for this summer. I looked up the other day and realized that in two weeks I go back to work. Argh.
Meanwhile, I received a phone call from my past. It was a former high school classmate asking if I would return for my 30th reunion. She said her name and while it sounded familiar, I couldn't place her face in my memory.
I didn't promise anything. I told her I'd look at my calendar and after hanging up the phone, for a few brief minutes, I contemplated attending. Then I checked out the website she'd provided where all events are listed. There's the gathering at the local tavern, there's the big meal for $60 a plate, there's the memorial golf tournament for a classmate who died this year and much more.
On the website you can update everyone on your life in a section called Current Biographies. I clicked on it and then scrolled down through the names remembering (or trying to) all the classmates with whom I spent four years of my life. With a flash of slight recognition, I clicked on certain names and read their bios at first with interest and then with continued despair. 90 percent of them still lived in Bremerton. Most of them referenced God or The Lord or Jesus in some way positive or glorifying. Many of them were married to each other. All had children...lots of them... and many of the entries, I dare say, were written in all CAPS with an abundance of misspelled words not to mention challenging grammar.
I will not judge...these words ran through my head as every minute passed...and then I remembered my brief conversation on the phone with my former, faceless classmate: Don't worry, she'd said, if you're gray or fat or really changed. We're all that way!
She was so happy about it. She was so chipper. She was thrilled that I would even consider attending.
As I worked my way through the website, memories shot back at me like I was hooked up to electroshock aversion therapy:
The nasty notes on my locker -- queer, lezzie, dyke
That time in the locker room when two of my classmates threw me across the floor and kicked and punched me and called me a freak
The leers in class
The time in Psychology class when someone wrote into the suggestion box that homosexuality was a sin and everyone turned and looked at me
The fight in the hallway when a white kid called a black kid a nigger and I was a nigger lover for being their friend
These were my classmates. Now they'd found God. Now they'd married each other and reproduced. Now they were fat. Now they were gray. Now they claimed to have really changed.
I was doubtful. I still am.
Ann said, "You should go!"
I said, "Why?"
"Just to see. I'll go with you."
"Wouldn't that be a hoot. I wonder if they'd corner me in the bathroom and read scriptures to me this time."
"Probably, but it's better than being beat up, isn't it?"
"There are many ways," I responded, "to be beat up. Verbally is one of the worst."
Funny how, after so much time (and therapy), just one phone call, just one look at the pictures of my past can bring up such doubt and insecurity.
"I can't go," I told Ann.
"Then don't," she said calmly. "How many students were in your class?" she asked as an afterthought.
"A bit over 200 I think."
"How many are listed in the biographies?"
I got her point. "About 50," I smiled.
"So there's 150 or more who, like you, haven't responded. I wonder how many of them are gay?"
Or liberal or childless or out of the state or the country or atheist or Buddhist or Muslim or unmarried or ...
2 comments:
Sounds like a high school nightmare. I'll wager you would probably be pretty surprised and pretty self-satisfied once you saw what those demons have turned into: stupid, ugly bigots with couch-wide asses. Go and have a laugh or two.
I wasn't gay but I was different - one classmate I recently met in Fred Meyer told me that, in high school, she had always thought of me as someone from another planet. I think I thought that same thing about myself. You know, there is one person you love very much who was born in SIlverdale and has stayed in Bremerton for forty-plus years. Well, all her life, except for brief stints in Tacoma and Seattle. She just bought a most interesting book titled "God Is Not Great". She goes to her reunions - every one except for the first one, because I was still too traumatized. This person was never beat up by a classmate, but her mother slapped her around more than a few times before she went to school. Her home was not safe, and school did not feel safe, either. Even so, she goes to all her reunions and each one gets better and better. This person has wondered if reunions are not better when one has gone to school with one's classmates since first grade. Because a bond forms between these people even if they were once rough, tough assholes. You only have to see them once a year and you can leave any time you want. Or- you don't have to go at all. Ever. But what an experience to write about, from the inner and the outer. Plus, you have your partner to fill you in on her insights and outsights.
What a thing to write about for, say, CREATIVE NONFICTION! Now, there's an essay for you.
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